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Comment by snazz | Hacker News Reader

What are you going to do for a "few years"? The potential long-term side effects from covid far outweigh the potential side-effects of a well-tested vaccine.

> I am surprised so many people are suddenly in full "believe the science" mode

Two reasons:

1. We want our lives back. Covid sucks and people are getting tired of the precautions. Many of us are still being careful to protect others, but "covid fatigue" is very real. A vaccine promises tangible light at the end of this tunnel.

2. While many of the efficacy trials are shorter than normal, there's no reason to believe that these vaccines are dangerous. mRNA ones, in particular, basically can't give patients the virus itself, unlike many other kinds of vaccines.

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For a healthy young adult, what are the potential long term side effects of covid? For most healthy young adults it is a mild flu in terms of symptoms. I know there is a minor risk of having a worse case, but the odds of that for young adults with healthy BMIs is low. I'll take the vaccine when it is available but I understand that others are looking at the risk/reward and being distrustful of a vaccine. Particularly when the vaccines have been rushed and have unknown long term effects

There's some decent evidence of long-term (permanently?) lowered VO2Max in a large proportion of cases in younger people, along with lower quality evidence of prevalence of scarier post-infective consequences. I don't really want even a minor case of COVID-19.

Yes, the vaccines may be riskier than we're accustomed to. GBS is a 1 per million side effect in most vaccines, with some proportion of these people having permanent side effects. I wouldn't be surprised if we find that these vaccines are more like 1 in 25k. But that's better than the odds even young people face from COVID-19.

I know some healthy young people who have a much harder time exercising months after getting the virus, but I concede that those cases are fairly rare—although much more common than any issues from vaccines in trial.

Thinking about it from a societal perspective, I'm willing to take a small risk from getting the vaccine to avoid inadvertently getting and spreading the virus to more vulnerable people like my grandparents.

What is the rational risk/reward that shows the vaccine is more dangerous than the disease?

> For a healthy young adult, what are the potential long term side effects of covid?

From an overall risk/reward perspective, I would include the risk of subsequently infecting your parents, grandparents or other vulnerable/high-risk family/friends with severe disease as a 'potential long term side effect' of covid in a young/low-risk individual.

Note though that it isn't clear at this point to what extent the vaccine confers sterilizing immunity.

I'm thinking of not rushing out to get vaccinated right away.

(1) My company switched to work from home two or three years ago, I've just recently subscribed to Walmart+ so I've got free grocery delivery for a year, I've gotten into the habit of making my own meals which is healthier and cheaper than how I ate pre-COVID so I'm going to stick with that even after COVID is gone, and my socializing was almost all online before COVID.

It is no problem for me to keep mostly quarantined for another year.

(2) The few times in the next year I will have to interact closely with other people will probably be with people who have taken it (e.g., doctors and dentists).

(3) While it is true that mRNA vaccines cannot give you the thing they are vaccinating against, it is still possible they will have other side effects. As far as I know there is no way to determine the long term risk of a medicine other than just waiting to see.

(4) I live in a county that has not been hit hard.

(5) It looks like there are at least two vaccines that are going to get quick approval, and I believe there are more deeply into their phase 3 tests.

Putting this all together, it seems I personally have a pretty low chance of getting COVID, and if I do get it a pretty low chance of spreading it while I'm still asymptotic, so can afford to wait and see if any of the vaccines have longer term issues or if one of them is clearly better than the others.

How far out are you drawing the line? You mention another year so it's gonna suck more in an ironic sense for you if side effects come out 2, 5, 20 years from now.

I'll be the first in the queue personally. Lets get back outside, even I'm bored of these walls now.

> I'll be the first in the queue personally. Lets get back outside, even I'm bored of these walls now.

Excellent! That is exactly what I want. The more people who take it because they are either at high risk, or because avoiding exposure seriously harms their lifestyle, the more data there will be for me when I decide to take it.

As far as side effects go, the kind of things that take years to show up are usually things that you'd only see in a medicine that you have to take regularly.

The latest research suggests that we probably get long term COVID immunity. Those few cases of people getting it twice were probably people who got a small viral load the first time and didn't develop strong immunity.

All the COVID vaccines look like they will be take once (or take twice over a short period) and that's it, so we almost certainly won't see anything like people developing cancer from it 5 years later. Those things take times to build up, like say we had with Actos and bladder cancer, with each time you take it adding to the risk.

If there are long term bad effects from the COVID vaccines, the underlying damage will happen within a couple weeks or so of taking them, and then should start being detectable in the health statistics of people who took it versus people who did not within a year.

Thus, at the latest we should know about any long term effects by the time my Walmart+ subscription is up for renewal, which is perfect timing.

Have a plan and stick to it! Sounds good!

Good points regarding the build up, thanks for the response

It seems like tzs is some kind of basement dweller who would prefer to never leave the house even in the absence of a pandemic, in which case holding off on the vaccine does seem like the optimal move.

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